Every good thing becomes a bad thing when it becomes the ultimate thing in our lives.

That is true of anything we use to replace God as our supreme treasure.

And so for many, our job becomes that, it becomes the ultimate thing.

Careers where so many in this world will turn to to find their ultimate identity.

We are back one more time with Bruce Heindmarsh, a historian and the James M. Houston professor of spiritual theology at Regent College in Vancouver.

So talk to us about battling this tendency, work requires much of our lives, and it can claim all of our lives, unless we set boundaries.

So we have Sabbath, one day of rest each week, it's built into the created order, and it helps keep labor in its place.

Now in a recent interview, you said something that caught my attention, you said, quote,

Sabbath is not pixie dust, you sprinkle over six days of workaholism.

End quote. So explain this Bruce, how does one day of rest influence how we work Monday to Friday?

Oh, that's great. I think Sabbath is a reminder that we receive our work as a gift.

We tend to see the world as it's so constituted, it's remotivated by either fear or greed, but it's a sense of scarcity.

It's a sense of scarcity and a sense of anxiety that pervades people's work.

And there's all sorts of things written about the movement towards total work and an environment of total work.

Sabbath recalls us now that we've done enough work. Now that we've done enough work, we're entitled to rest.

It reminds us that we actually begin with rest. We begin with what God has done, and it pulls back to God's creation as a good gift of a good God in which it's been given and God has rested in what he has made, and we receive our very life again as a gift.

We didn't have to be here. God made the world for us. God made us for the world. We receive that as a gift. And work itself, we receive that as a gift.

Work is a response to vocation, to calling. It's a gift. And then we, it's an anticipation of our heavenly rest.

It's a reminder that God is at work. God is bringing Shalom, and we remember that there remains a rest for the people of God.

God's salvation is already broken, and God is redeeming the broken world. And so we can go into our week with a sense of without the same sense of work as a matter of anxiety.

We can receive our work as actually a gift, a chance to offer up the work of our hands to a good God who's already done everything and gives us the opportunity to share with him in the work of preserving, sustaining, and redeeming on the world he's made.

Very good. Of course, that reference to total work is from Joseph Piper's book, Leisure. And so essentially, Bruce, if I understand you, what you're saying is one day of rest does not sanctify a week of unhealthy work habits.

...